Yeah, maybe that's the difference. I was trying to probe the semantics, not so much a "gotcha". Parts of this stack are quite bespoke for this one game.

Yeah this seems to be the case in all of the recent “recomp” projects I’ve seen popping up lately. They turn it into c++ but it’s not what you’d imagine when you think of decompiling - it’s basically assembly-like writing to a machine/cpu state object representing memory/registers etc. And then they also call it a native port to boot!